"When the year was ending, the deputy headmaster called me in and said, 'We learned that you go to church. You have to make a decision - either you stop going to church and continue with us, or you have to leave.' So I had to leave because I didn't want to stop going to church."
"At seventeen, for that year [after my father's death], then the Svazarm people came and lured us. And I got excited, so I went home and I said, 'Mum, I would like to fly.' My mum was scared, but because she saw me staying at home all that year, not going anywhere, becoming quite a bit of a nasty person, she thought, 'Well, at least a girl's interested in something.' So she went to the police - she couldn't sign that at home because they were afraid I'd forge a signature."
"[As the] front approached, my mother and father thought that at the grandma in Hlušovice it would be better, quieter than in town, so they took me there. And it was the opposite, it was worse there. Because the Russians were coming from Šternberk and the Germans had retreated to the Černovír Forest, so Hlušovice became such a place of action. The Russians came there and they even made an infirmary behind houses. And of course there was shooting, missiles were flying, even a plane was on fire - it was falling [directly on the grandpa's house] - and those Russians had such a machine gun nest there, so they shot it away so that it didn't fall on the house."
Ludmila Soltysiaková, born on 19 May 1939 in Olomouc, spent the last days of the Second World War in Hlušovice, where the Red Army set up an infirmary at her grandparents‘ home. After the death of her father, she found her passion in flying as a secondary school student and later in the theatre. She worked as a teacher until the school administration learned of her Christian faith, which she was not about to give up; fortunately, no one was particularly interested in her church attendance later wehen she worked in an engineering position. After her disability retirement, she began working with the United Organization of the Blind and Visually Impaired (SONS), where she worked for over 20 years. In 2025, she lived in Olomouc in the flat she inherited from her parents.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
